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The City of the Saved
The City of the Saved was a metropolis the size of a spiral galaxy located between the end of the Universe and the beginning of the next. The City itself was the timeship Compassion, who had lodged herself between Universes. The only entrance to the City was the Uptime Gate. It was inhabited by every single Australopithecine, human, near-human, and humanoid who was ever resurrected after death in an immortal, invulnerable body. Only human beings were resurrected and those that were partially human were treated as second class citizens known as "collaterals" who were also forbidden from holding public office. Whenever history was rewritten by the War between the Great Houses and their Enemy then the City's history was retroactively rewritten with it to include any new human beings or versions of them that were brought into existence by the change. This meant that the population of the City was much larger than anyone else on the outside suspected. It was constructed by two Secret Architects who were a mystery but many believed the City itself was a goddess that was worshipped under the name of Civitata. The Rump Parliament was Faction Paradox's stronghold within the City. All races but pure humans were marginalised in the city's society, Grandfather Halfling set up House Halfling to campaign for the rights of those who were not quite human. Overview The City of the Saved, which has been mentioned earlier, appears to be a separate, small universe located after the end of this Universe and before the beginning of the next. Within the City, every single human being who has ever lived has been resurrected in an immortal and indestructible body, and allowed to mingle in a city the size of a spiral galaxy. Time travel is not possible within the City, which has been in existence for 300 years as of the publication of The Book of the War. The City is linked to the Spiral Politic by the Uptime Gate; its universal terminus is located at the exact point of the frontier in time beyond which the Homeworld finds it difficult to venture, and a cosmopolitan society of, effectively, border guards has been established around the Gate. It is suspected that there may be a Downtime Gate as well, linking the City to the next Universe to come after this, but this has not yet been confirmed. Nobody knows the identity of the so-called Secret Architects who created the City of the Saved, but it’s been noted that the enemy, said by some to have originated on Earth, is the only War-era power not to have taken any interest in the City. The Secret Architects have only shown their hand once, perhaps, in the attack staged by strategist Lady Mantissa of House Mirraflex. Mirraflex is a particularly fanatical bloodline whose members have gone to extreme lengths to protect history as they know it, and it was Lady Mantissa who first came up with the idea of creating duplicate Homeworlds. One of the worlds cryptoformed into another Homeworld had originally been a human colony, and one of its natives, Verrifant, submitted to the Houses and was transformed into a regen-inf soldier. Even after his death and resurrection in the City, he retained his loyalty to the Great Houses. He disguised his sympathies long enough to get himself elected Mayor, at which point he began to campaign for stronger ties between the City and the Homeworld. When this platform was rejected, he betrayed the City, opening up the Uptime Gate and allowing Lady Mantissa to invade the City with timeships reconfigured as behemoths, which literally began to eat vast sections of the City, starting in Snakefell District. Once swallowed by the timeship-behemoths, the citizens were isolated from the City’s state of temporal grace, and became vulnerable to being crushed to death within the behemoths’ bodies. However, the attack was defeated when unknown parties launched the weapons of mass destruction that had been stockpiled by certain fanatical factions, and somehow managed to turn off the City’s defences just long enough for the weapons to detonate and drive the behemoths out of the City. The citizens killed in the assault were resurrected once again, and Verrifant fled from the City. His subsequent fate is unknown, but since he was presumably killed once more while serving the Great Houses, he must have been resurrected for a second time, and thus his current incarnation is being hunted down in the City to be tried as a war criminal. Lady Mantissa has accepted responsibility for the failure and gone into exile on one of the Nine Homeworlds. Only humans have been resurrected in the City of the Saved, which has caused much controversy -- particularly when it comes to the treatment of alien/human hybrids, who are regarded as second-class citizens. There have been some attempts to change this. Het Linc, a posthuman polymath and former Ambassador to the Homeworld, once offered sanctuary within the City to asylum-seekers from the Homeworld; however, the City Council refused to support his offer and recalled him from his post. Amanda Legend Lefcourt, who was born within the City, is a particularly outspoken supporter of non-human and hybrid rights. She has recently been affiliated with House Halfling, whose founder, Grandfather Halfling, is half-human and half of Homeworld ancestry. Faction Paradox is represented in the City by the Rump Parliament, which is allied with the Order of the Iron Soul, cybernetically-converted humans who were resurrected with their augmentations intact. This alliance is largely due to the influence of Cousin Pinocchio, a cybernetic human who was converted to Faction Paradox by a biodata virus that rewrote his entire personal history. One of the Rump Parliament’s most noted members is Father Timon, who lived in the 15th century under the name of Robin Wright. Physically deformed but mechanically adept, he was eventually burnt at the stake as a witch; when resurrected in the City, he was ghettoised by those who recognised his deformities as the result of genetic tampering by the Homeworld. He finally found acceptance in the Rump Parliament, and was killed in action while on a mission out in the Spiral Politic -- at which point he was resurrected for a second time, contacted the Rump Parliament, and advised them on how to recruit his past self. The Celestis are also quite concerned about the City of the Saved, particularly since their own human servants have been resurrected within it, implying that one day Mictlan will fall. (The Memeovore attack has not happened yet; that story is not actually part of the Book, but was planted within it by the Shift.) The Celestis are particularly disturbed by the fact that many of their former servants are now campaigning actively against them in the Spiral Politic. The most noted activist is Gargil Krymptorpor, a posthuman pirate marked by the Celestis at birth and forced to kill her own crew when the Celestis activated her mark. In the City, she has become the leader of the Ghetto of the Damned, and has urged that the City declare war against the Celestis. One of the Celestis Lords, Foaming Sky, once attempted to invade the City using an adjusted worldofme device to create an infinite number of copies of himself within the City; however, his army was defeated by the Rump Parliament and the Order of the Iron Soul. Lord Foaming Sky was later murdered within Mictlan by one of his own servants, who was given sanctuary in the City by Amanda Legend Lefcourt. Two other notable organisations within the City are the Piltdown Mob, a criminal organisation led by a Neanderthal con artist named Arr Ri; and the Sons of Tepes, resurrected Mal’akh hybrids who, as noted earlier, worship Vlad III, much to his frustration and anger. Leader Compassion was the designation of a series of Remote operatives sequentially remembered from Laura Tobin, the fifth and last of which became the first humaniform timeship. As a Remote colonist on Ordifica, and later involved in the evacuation to Anathema, Tobin was noted for her sarcasm, and this thus became a dominant trait in her remembered versions, leading to the ironic use of "Compassion" as a name. On becoming the passenger of an antiquated 40-form timeship, her receiver began to pick up the continuous transmissions of block transfer computations between different parts of the timeship with which it maintained its integrity. This led to a radical rewriting of Compassion's fundamental nature, and she became the first and only 102-form timeship. The Great Houses, who had been attempting to create a human sentient timeship for some time, immediately set about trying to capture her, leading her to go on the run. At some indeterminate future point, an accommodation was reached and the 103-form timeships were created. The details of this remain shrouded in mystery, although the creation of Antipathy was known to have come about as an early failure. Few details were available of Compassion's later involvement in the War. What was known came largely from the fictionalised accounts of her sometime human companion Carmen Yeh. In an attempt to provide a safe haven for humanity during the War, Compassion lodged herself between her universe and the next. By doing this she was able to change her interior dimensions to create the City of the Saved. Races Australopithecine were early ancestors of humanity. Being a form of human, they were included in the City of the Saved. Humans were the dominant species of the planet Earth. Humans were a species of sentient primates. Though humans could trace their evolutionary past to Earth, many billions of humans were born on other worlds, after humanity spread through the cosmos. Humans became so widespread that they eventually came to emphasise their relationship to worlds other than Earth, choosing to think of themselves not as Earthlings, but as Venusians, Martians.Earthbound or Earth-identifying humans went by many names over Earth's long history. For a time, they were commonly called Tellurians or Terrans — both derived from alternate names for Earth. According to Mesanth, "human" could refer to any human-like creature, so a more precise term like Earthon should have been used to refer to the Earth's inhabitants. Humans were special in the universe. Humanity had an instinctive need to protect their own genetic line. This could make them resistant to control, such as cyber-conversion. Innate psychic abilities were rare but not unknown. Many humans had telepathic powers, though in almost all cases it was weak or suppressed. Individual humans displayed psychic powers such as psychometry, telepathy or time-sensitivity. Humans had little in the way of telepathic emissions and were difficult to track telepathically. A near-human was a type of humanoid whose external features very closely resembled those of humans. Near-humans were included in the City of the Saved. Manfolk '''were a genetically altered species of human. Male Manfold were hormonally predisposed towards violence and bloody interaction. Manfolk were born in litters of between three to eight children. Manfolk were created by Antipathy from humans who had their DNA altered. After their creation, Antipathy wiped out the Manfolk species, in order for them to be reborn in the City of the Saved. '''Groups House Halfling was a political faction founded in the City of the Saved by Grandfather Halfling. House Halfling campaigned for equal rights between all inhabitants of the City of the Saved, regardless of their lineage, a task in which they succeeded, using their non-violence tactics which they picked up from their leader. Amanda Legend Lefcourt spoke for the house in the Chamber of Residents, the House was however, only a minority influence in the Chamber. The ultimate aim of the House, at least in Lefcourt's eyes, was to see the City of the Saved open its doors to all races and not just humans. This idea faced fierce opposition from the other Houses in the city. The Rump Parliament '''was Faction Paradox's stronghold within the City of the Saved. The Parliament was governed by Godmother Jezebel and Godfathers Avatar and Lo. '''Technology The Universal Machine was a computer capable of reaching across the history of mankind and perceiving, recording and copying any machine ever built by humans. Remakes were a species created by citizen Sharp of the City of the Saved. They were created using Rememberance tanks and moulded into the forms of fictional characters, such as Sherlock Holmes. The Car Park was an area in RealSpace in the City of the Saved. It contained the following vehicles: stagecoaches, Steam-trains, flying carpets, biplanes, monorails, moledelvers, dog-carts, dingy, agee discs, in-comb cars, a-voiders, penny-farthings, chariots, an aircraft carrier, amphibious tanks, donkeybots, tractors, timecars, ornithopters, hang-gliders, paddle-steamers, rockets, fighters, shuttlecraft, broomsticks, sleds, aircraft, traction engines, hovermopeds, harness-wings, float, coffin-capsules, raft, wallcrawlers, juggernauts, metallipedes, a generation starship, junks, schooners, hypertransports, tunnellers, pagoda-pods, kayaks, airliners, skateboards, chronic jaunting trousers, skis, steam-powered elephants, land ironclads, perambulators, seven-league boots, flying saucers, traffic-stalkers, nuclear submarines and railway pumping trolleys. Category:Allied Faction